Cross-Cultural Transformational Leadership

In an increasingly interdependent world, global leadership understanding for international collaboration [1] is vital for the development of cross-cultural leadership [2]. This essay provides some hints on what might be determining leadership prototype’s effectiveness from different global perspectives [3].

Universal and culture-specific features of transformational leadership

Transformational leadership facilitates change through shared vision, intellectual stimulation, and support of individual’s aspirations [4] and is therefore essential for solving contemporary threats that require change [5]. Social change movements need to be put into the context of globalization [6]. The effectiveness of general transformational leadership was found a cross-culturally valid concept [7]. For example, transformational leaders were able to motivate their followers independent of cultural context [8]. In contrast, the desirability and effectiveness of transactional leadership turned out to be culture-dependent [9]. On a more detailed level, also transformational leadership contains some culture-sensitive aspects [10]. For example, enabling others to act and challenging the process appeared to be culture independent, while inspiration through shared vision and showing the way was negatively correlated to cultural values such as uncertainty avoidance [11].

Societal and cultural beliefs and values

Following the rationale and evidence that the concept of leadership has to be understood against the backdrop of social, historical, and cultural context [12], what are these factors then? Leadership literature has been criticized for being US-centric [2]. Indeed, 98 percent of leadership concepts stem from Western values and don’t assume a cross-cultural view [12]. As change involves setting goals [13], and as beliefs about goals represent values, it becomes clear that leadership is not decoupled from the social and cultural context [14]. Consequently, subordinates may respond differently according to their cultural value orientation [15]. For example, while, besides a charismatic leadership style, a participative leadership dimension is most important in the US, Latin America prioritizes team-orientation, and Eastern Europe scored highest in team-oriented and human-oriented aspects [16]. According to the implicit theory of leadership, the bedrock of leadership is how a certain style like transformational leadership gets implicitly meaningful and fine-tuned by the cultural endorsement of values such as, for example, collectivism/individualism, power distance, and level of context [17].

Global leadership understanding for international collaboration

Despite significant differences measured on national mean levels, individual differences shouldn’t be forgotten when examining cross-cultural differences [18]. Especially power distance orientation has proven to provide a better individual-level measure than individualism/collectivism as the central cultural value [4]. Power distance orientation describes the degree of acceptance and expectation of unequally distributed power [19, 20]. For example, emotional commitment to a transformational leader was higher among followers low in power distance [21]. Beyond national culture, there are even more relevant variables, such as politics, language, feminine and masculine tendencies, and organizational culture [22]. Person-job fit was fund to mediate inclusive leadership and employee well-being [23]. In an increasingly interdependent world, global leadership understanding for international collaboration [1] is vital for the development of cross-cultural leadership [2]. This essay provided some hints on what might be determining leadership prototype’s effectiveness from different global perspectives [3].

photo credit: geralt (pixabay.com)

References

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